Jan 13, 2016

What have I been up to since October? Less than I would have liked. However, I've made some excellent progress on the crafting system again, taking some influence from games I've been playing recently. Unfortunately I find it way too easy to make my game systems crazy complicated.

One of the risks of being a one man dev operation is you have to be your own bullshit filter. I often get so enamoured with an idea I'm working on I don't realise it will be terribly complicated for the player until I'm a decent way in. Eventually (once the shine wears off) the sanity police rock up and I drastically cut functionality and make it sane. I just wish it'd happen sooner, so I don't waste development effort. :)

On a related note, recently I've discovered some annoying issues in my codebase that are not going to be quick fixes and are preventing me from building certain pieces of functionality. They are relatively minor presentation things, so it isn't a big deal at this stage, but at some point I'm going to have to redesign my UI system to be more flexible. Not looking forward to that at all.

On a non coding front, I recently made some major breakthroughs on the backstory front. I've broadly defined the story elements that will occur leading up to the player taking control and even had some ideas for a short intro sequence to relate this to the player. Previously I had a general idea for what I wanted but there was no clear path from normal world to the game world, narratively speaking.

In the development pipeline for the future I have: Finishing off the crafting system, as well as some technical architecture things such as a procedural content system I've been itching to get going on, as well as rendering improvements such as LOD for my terrain meshes.